Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still 9780691252940

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
1 Mondrian and the architecture of the future
2 Malevich and the ascent into ether
3 Kandinsky and the sound of colour
4 Pollock and the search for a symbol
5 Newman, Rothko, Still and the reductive image
6 Newman, Rothko, Still and the abstract sublime
Notes on the text
List of illustrations and sources
Index

Citation preview

PATHS TO THE ABSOLUTE

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

have been delivered annually since 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing “the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” As publication was always an essential part of the vision for the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the talks. The first book in the series was published in 1953, and since 1967 all lectures have been published by Princeton University Press as part of the Bollingen Series. Now, for the first time, all the books in the series are available in one or more formats, including paperback and e-book, making many volumes that have long been out of print accessible to future generations of readers. This edition is supported by a gift in memory of Charles Scribner, Jr., former trustee and president of Princeton University Press. The Press is grateful to the Scribner family for their formative and enduring support, and for their commitment to preserving the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for posterity. Images in this edition may have been altered in size and color from their appearance in the original print editions to make this book available in accessible formats.

PATHS TO THE ABSOLUTE Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still

JOHN GOLDING

The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1997 The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bollingen Series XXXV • 48 °%o

Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

For Helen and Phil

Copyright © 2000 by the Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Published in North America by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 This is the forty-eighth volume of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in the Bollingen Series, sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation. All Rights Reserved Designed by Keith Lovegrove Composed in Sabon MT

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Golding, John. Paths to the absolute : Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still / John Golding. p. cm. — (The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; 1997) (Bollingen series ; XXXV, 48) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-04896-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Painting, European. 2. Painting, Abstract—Europe. 3. Painting, Modern—20th century—Europe. 4. Painting, American. 5. Painting, Abstract—United States. 6. Painting, Modern—20th century—United States. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series: Bollingen series ; XXXV, 48 ND458.5.A37 G65 2000 9.o6'52—dc2i

New paperback printing 2023 ISBN (paper) 978-0-691-25293-3 ISBN (ebook) 978-0-691-25294-0

00-023172

The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts Delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C 1952

Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

1953

Sir Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form

1954

Sir Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture

1955

Etienne Gilson, Art and Reality

1956

E. H. Gombrich, The Visible World and the Language of Art

1957

Sigfried Giedion, Constancy and Change in Art and

1958

Sir Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin and French Classicism

Architecture

1959

Naum Gabo, A Sculptor's View of the Fine Arts

1960

Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, Horace Walpole

1961

Andre Grabar, Christian Iconography and the Christian Religion in Antiquity

1962

Kathleen Raine, William Blake and Traditional

1963

Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Artist and Individual: Some Aspects of the Renaissance Portrait

1964

Jakob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence, Past and Present

1965

Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of

1966

Lord David Cecil, Dreamer or Visionary: A Study of English Romantic

196-/

Mario Praz, On the Parallel of Literature and the Visual Arts

Mythology

Romanticism

1968

Stephen Spender, Imaginative Literature and Painting

1969

Jacob Bronowski, Art as a Mode of Knowledge

1970

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Aspects of Nineteenth-Century

1971

T. S. R. Boase, Vasari: The Man and the Book

1972

Ludwig H. Heydenreich, Leonardo da Vinci

1973

Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art

1974

H. W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century

1975

H. C. Robbins Landon, Music in Europe in the Year 1776

Sculpture

Peter von Blanckenhagen, Aspects of Classical Art

1977

Andre Chastel, The Sack of Rome: 1527

1978

Joseph W. Alsop, The History of Art Collecting

X

John Rewald, Cezanne and America

1980

Peter Kidson, Principles of Design in Ancient and Medieval

1981

John Harris, Palladian Architecture in England,

1982

Leo Steinberg, The Burden of Michelangelo's

1983

Vincent Scully, The Shape of France

1984

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art

1985

James S. Ackerman, The Villa in History

Architecture

Reconsidered

1976

979

Painting

Architecture

161J-1760

Painting

1986

Lukas Foss, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century

1987

Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons

1988

John Shearman, Art and the Spectator in the Italian

1989

Oleg Grabar, Intermediary Demons: Toward a Theory of

1990

Jennifer Montagu, Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Roman

1991

Willibald Sauerlander, Changing Faces: Art and Physiognomy

1992.

Anthony Hecht, On the Laws of the Poetic Art

Composer Renaissance Ornament Baroque

through the Ages

1993

Sir John Boardman, The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity

1994

Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century

1995

Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History

Europe

1996

Pierre Rosenberg, From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, and Ingres

T-997

John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

1998

Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art

1999

Carlo Bertelli, Transitions

Contents Preface 1 Mondrian and the architecture of the future

7 9

2 Malevich and the ascent into ether

47

3 Kandinsky and the sound of colour

81

4 Pollock and the search for a symbol

113

5 Newman, Rothko, Still and the reductive image

153

6 Newman, Rothko, Still and the abstract sublime

195

Notes on the text

233

List of illustrations and sources

235

Index

239

Preface

There is in existence no standard work on the origins, birth and dissemination of abstract art in the twentieth century, let alone a definitive study of the subject: its manifestations are too diverse, its ramifications too complex. Michel Seuphor's pioneering UArt abstrait, ses origines, ses premieres maitres, published in Paris in 1950, remains a useful work of reference, but it is dictionary-like in structure. In this respect it anticipates most subsequent works on the subject, although these are in fact surprisingly few. Two historically important exhibitions underline divergent approaches towards abstraction and changing critical attitudes. Alfred Barr's epoch-making 'Cubism and Abstract Art' was mounted in New York at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936. As its title implied, the exhibition stressed the formalistic implications of abstraction and its antecedents. Looking back over the twentieth century, it is clear that Cubism remains its pivotal visual movement. Cubism was concerned with questioning the nature of perceived reality. In doing so, it reinvented the language, the very syntax of painting and sculpture. Cubism was also the threshold over which many artists passed in arriving at abstraction; and Cubism's concerns were largely formalistic. Of the great pioneering abstractionists only Kandinsky chose to ignore Cubism in his own work, although he was of course fully aware of its development and its significance. Barr's catalogue is broken down into sections, preceded by short but important essays, and it is notable that the passages on Kandinsky, the first under the heading 'Abstract Expressionism in Germany', are the most awkward. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, co-ordinated by Maurice Tuchman, and staged at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986, has been the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of abstraction to date. It subsequently travelled to The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. The exhibition was accompanied by a weighty catalogue containing a wealth of essays by distinguished art historians. These texts reflected a tendency to concentrate on the philosophical and Symbolist background to abstraction and on its connections with Theosophy, the occult, and various other esoteric systems of thought which informed many of its early manifestations. This allowed for the inclusion in the exhibition of many minor and

virtually forgotten figures, some of whom produced works of questionable aesthetic value or appeal. When I was invited to deliver the forty-sixth series of A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, I sought for a subject that might reflect something of a lifetime spent as a teacher of twentieth-century art at both an academic and a studio level, and also something of my own interests as a practising painter. The idea came to me that it might be fruitful to examine aspects of the work of the three greatest European pioneering abstract painters - Mondrian, Malevich and Kandinsky - and to compare and contrast these with some of the concerns of their great American successors - Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still - who in the 1940s and 1950s succeeded in endowing abstraction with a renewed sense of purpose. It was they who reaffirmed the fact that, at its best and most profound, abstract painting is heavily imbued with meaning, with content, and that, in order to make this content palpable, new formal pictorial innovations must be found to express it. The lectures (which in my slightly revised texts I refer to as essays) are basically monographic in their organization. But they also attempt to examine the ambitions shared by all seven artists and simultaneously to indicate the different visual means by which each reached his goal. It is of deep significance that of these artists five reached artistic maturity notably late in life. Even the two most temperamental and impetuous, Malevich and Pollock, were well into their thirties before they stormed the citadel of abstraction. It remains a source of some wonder, given the fact that abstraction has been with us as a fact of life for over eighty years, that it was only in the second half of the 1950s and in the 1960s that there came into existence a generation of artists who felt that they could turn directly and immediately to abstraction as a viable idiom. Countless younger artists, originally exhilarated by the prospects opened up by the pioneering European abstractionists, and subsequently an even greater number who sought to emulate the new American abstraction, came to recognize to their grief, often to their very artistic extinction, that they were not after all certain of what it was they were trying to say or express through the various abstract idioms they had adopted. Each of the artists here examined, on the other hand, had been inspired by the fact that he was on the path to some new, ultimate pictorial truth or certainty, to a visual absolute. August 1999

PREFACE

J.G.

Mondrian and the architecture of the future Piet Mondrian was the purest and most single-minded of the great pioneering abstractionists. He felt simplicity to be the ideal state of humankind; and there is a sense in which he himself was a simple man. However, the apparent simplicity of his own art is also dangerously deceptive. Similarly, he came to reject totally the use of symbols; and yet although his abstraction is informed by the idealistic philosophy with which he became imbued, he reached his initial conclusions through hermetic systems of thought saturated with symbolic content. Mondrian was born in 1872. That is to say, he was ten years older than Picasso and Braque, the inventors of Cubism, the style which was to be the catalyst for his own equally radical visual revolution. More than half of Mondrian's total output belongs to the years between 1890 and 1907; but it was only after this that Mondrian began to hit his stride. His natural gifts as an artist were not outstanding; and he was a slow starter. Mondrian was the son of the principal of a Protestant elementary school and he grew up in an atmosphere of Calvinism that was liberal but 1 still imbued with a strong Puritan heritage. The view of the Jacobskerk in the village of Winterswijk seen from the garden of his family home, painted early in 1898, tells a tale. The picture is stylistically unremarkable within the context of contemporary Dutch landscape painting; but it has about it a moody intensity, and in the light of Mondrian's subsequent development it is interesting to note the way in which the sullen, grey sky is caught up between the skeletal black branches of the trees in the foreground and pressed forward onto the surface of the picture. If this early picture tells us something about the role of religion in provincial Dutch 2 life at the turn of the century, Composition II with Blue, for example, painted some forty years later, says something about art as icon, about art as substitute for religious belief. Through his Uncle Frits, who had taken over the family barber's shop in The Hague and was himself a painter, Mondrian came into contact with the school of art which bore the city's name. The Hague School combined traditional Dutch principles with the influence of the Barbizon School and other pre-Impressionist French art; and by the time that Mondrian encountered it, it was becoming increasingly conservative in outlook. Amsterdam, where Mondrian registered at the Rijksakademie in 1892, was livelier and more receptive to contemporary trends

1 Mondrian,The Jacobskerk, Winterswijk, pencil, charcoal, pastel, watercolour and gouache on paper, 1898. 2 Mondrian, Composition II with Blue, oil on canvas, c. 1936-42.

3 Mondrian, Evening on the Gein with Isolated Tree, oil on canvas,

from abroad; but although Mondrian absorbed some of the current interest in Symbolism, he was still standing apart from progressive trends, just as he belonged to and yet stood apart from the city's bohemian community. And the truth is that as a painter Mondrian was ultimately an autodidact, struggling against his own technical limitations. But between 1906 and 1907 Mondrian's art begins to take on a new dimension. While remaining within the context of a- conservative Dutch landscape tradition, his paintings now start to catch and to hold the eye, partly because they begin to acquire a bolder, more reductive look, but above all because they now begin to generate what can only be described as a feeling of expectancy; this is experienced particularly strongly in a work such as Evening on the Gein with Isolated Tree 3 (c. 1907-8). These paintings are totally still and devoid of movement, yet they have about them a feeling of suppressed drama; the light comes almost invariably from behind, and is most often slowly sinking. Looking at them, we sense that something is about to happen. Twilight, for Mondrian at this stage in his career, was the hour of revelation and heightened sensibility, just as it was for Kandinsky. Mondrian had also by now begun to work in series, unlike his Dutch contemporaries

1 2

MONDRIAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

c. 1907-8.

V. '

and peers; in other words, he was thinking in terms of themes and not in terms of individual motifs. Mondrian wrote extensively about art, as also - at even greater length - did Malevich and Kandinsky. At the same time each painter insisted that in practice he proceeded purely intuitively and was not primarily a theoretician. Rather, all three were overwhelmed by the wealth of possibilities opening up to art as they sensed before them a network of shining paths into a new abstract hinter-world. And they felt the need to talk about it. In their writings they were not so much justifying their own art, and not one of the three men discusses his own art in any depth; rather they were in their different ways proclaiming the arrival of new sensibilities which could speak of new pictorial truths. In this respect their art had a moral cast in a way that the art of the Impressionists, to take a single example, did not. Mondrian's writings are often turgid and repetitive. They are further flawed by contradictions; and in this respect they are in marked contrast to his paintings, which so uniquely reconcile visual oppositions. The most revealing of Mondrian's texts from the point of view of his own development as a painter is also the most accessible, and it came to be his own particular MONDRIAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

4 Mondrian, Evening; Red Tree, oil on canvas, 1908.

favourite. Natural Reality and Abstract Reality, written 1919-20, takes the form of a 'Trialogue' - a three-way conversation between a Naturalistic Painter ('X'), a Layman ('Y') and what Mondrian calls an Abstract-Real Painter ('Z'), i.e. himself. It has as a subtitle While Strolling from the Country to the City.J The first scene is set in a river landscape (like that of Evening on the Gein) and the moon has risen. All three men agree on the beauty and inspiration to be found in nature. However, Z, the Abstract-Real Painter, says, 'We need not look past the natural, but we should in a sense see through it.'2 In a high proportion of Mondrian's work of this period the landscape is reflected in water, echoing and reversing the imagery above it and thus not only negating recession but also challenging the hierarchies of perceived reality. Z also remarks on the way twilight flattens things out, and there is already a tendency in Mondrian's mind to equate flatter effects with enhanced spirituality or with the generalized essence of things brought forward to confront the viewer directly. In the autumn of 1908 Mondrian paid a short visit to the village of Domburg in Zeeland; he was to return there often. The circle of artists working there under the unofficial leadership of Jan Toorop, who had produced his own very radical branch of Dutch Symbolism, was the most avant-garde to be found in Holland at the time. It introduced Mondrian to Neo-Impressionism. It is also highly likely that Mondrian had visited the Van Gogh retrospective, recently mounted in Amsterdam, which highlighted his French work; Evening; Red Tree of 1908 speaks 4 eloquently of Van Gogh's influence. The first Domburg visit transformed Mondrian into a modernist. He heightened his palette and yet altered and restricted it from painting to painting in such a way that harmonies glow and generate an intense, at times unnaturalistic, sense of light, a mystic light with symbolic implications; this can be experienced in Mill in Sunlight, also of 1908. But Mondrian's first 5 contacts with French Post-Impressionism were largely at second hand; and even when he became conversant with developments in the Parisian art world at first hand - and this was true even of his encounters with Cubism - they never came to him as the revelation that they did to Malevich and Kandinsky; rather he sought from them aspects that confirmed his own already determined artistic convictions. Of all great twentieth-century painters he is the most internalized and his development the most purely linear. Scene Four in Natural Reality and Abstract Reality shows 'A mill from close up, dark and sharply silhouetted against a bright night sky - its arms arrested in the form of a cross'. A pivotal image of Mondrian's, Red Mill at Domburg of 1 9 n , 6 comes instantly to mind. Z stresses the fact that the closeness of the mill makes the use of normal perspective impossible (one cannot situate it against a horizon line ). And here Z is already suggesting to us that one of the many ways into abstraction can involve a move up into the very breast of perceived reality and into the heart of what an individual canvas or series of canvases may be depicting. As with Mondrian's visual sources, so with his intellectual sources. Out of his personal background he formulated his own attitude to life, and he turned to outside intellectual stimulus for confirmation about what he already knew and felt: this separates him sharply from both Malevich who allowed himself to be bombarded by, and Kandinsky who sought out a vast range of both mainline and esoteric cross-currents of thought. In 1909 Mondrian wrote: '. . . my work remains entirely outside the occult realm, although I try to attain occult knowledge for myself in order to gain a better understanding of things.'3 Theosophy, which flourI 4

MONDRIAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

ished as a cult during the 1890s and the first two decades of the twentieth century, might perhaps be described as a sort of Western Buddhism. Its goal was transcendental knowledge. It sought to destroy the boundaries between all religions and to transform observation of the natural world into 'the inner eye'. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Mondrian claimed to have encountered Blavatsky's writings only in 1908; but he was aware of Theosophy earlier. At the time when Mondrian encountered Jan Toorop and his Domburg circle they were becoming increasingly interested in Theosophy and it was then that Mondrian recognized that its cosmology was what he himself had been looking for. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine came out in 1888; and it was to his friend Theo van Doesburg that Mondrian would confide that he got 'everything' from it.4 Today the lack of intellectual rigour which is one of the chief characteristics of Blavatsky's writings makes them hard to take. She was, however, astonishingly widely read and her books offer a short cut to a vast panorama of occult thought and religion. Indeed, to artists who saw themselves as being in a period of acute transition the tenets of Theosophy must have seemed marvellously suggestive and adaptable. Blavatsky was receptive to art and she sought common meanings and hidden, occult truths in the symbols and signs of art in all its manifestations. One of Mondrian's greatest debts to Theosophy was his subsequent and abiding belief that all life is directed towards evolution, and that the goal of art is to give expression to this principle. From Theosophy he also derived the idea that progress towards ultimate revelation comes through the balance and reconciliation of opposing forces and that this reconciliation may have to be achieved through the destruction of any principle or belief that is becoming too dominant. Rudolf Steiner, who was to found the dissenting Anthroposophical movement in 1913, also played a part in Mondrian's intellectual orientation. Mondrian subscribed to his proposition that the exalted knowledge sought by the Theosophist could be drawn from the observation of ordinary day-to-day visual phenomena, through 'conscious observation'. Steiner lectured in Holland not only on Theosophy but also on Goethe and Hegel. Mondrian's subsequent adherence to the three primary colours - red, yellow and blue - owes much to Goethe's colour theories, and it was his own very personal blend of the spiritual tinged initially by the occult (as encouraged by Theosophy), together with the Platonic idealism of Hegel, that was ultimately to confirm the premises of his art. Mondrian's fealty to Blavatsky can perhaps be explained by the fact that she saw religion and art as being on parallel paths and acknowledged that the aim of both was to transcend matter. An added attraction lay in the fact that, as far as art was concerned, she laid down no rules. Yet there is a sense in which Mondrian was to go beyond Theosophy when he entered his fully evolved abstract style. By 1919 he was beginning to reject certain aspects of Theosophical doctrine and soon he was complaining that the Theosophists 'could never achieve the experience of equivalent relationship' and hence never experience 'real, fully human harmony'.5 In short, for Mondrian art was beginning to become a substitute for religious experience. And with his rejection of Theosophy Mondrian left behind a world of vast, intangible and amorphous ideas to re-enter one of the most constricted of all worlds: that of the self-contained, small-scale easel painting. But there is no doubt that it was his contacts with Theosophy that turned Mondrian into the painterphilosopher he was to become. MONDRIAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

I 5

^

5 Mondrian, M/// in Sunlight, oil on canvas, 1908. 6 Mondrian, Red Mill at Domburg, oil on canvas, 1911.

7 Mondrian, Still Life with Ginger Pot II, oil on canvas, 1911-12.

The works that illustrate most directly Mondrian's involvement with Theosophical ideas are a handful of figure pieces executed between 1908 and 1911, and they are the least satisfactory of his entire career. On the other hand, the principles of Theosophy inform the landscapes which also show his awakened interest in Postand Neo-Impressionism, and they helped to endow these pictures with the haunting, numinous air that characterizes them. Mondrian came to see them as transitional in his development. However, it was the contacts with Cubism that marked the true turning-point in his career. As a prelude to his immersion in Cubism he turned to Cezanne, and through Cezanne he learned how to give equal pictorial weight to every single area of the picture surface. This can already be seen MONDRIAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

7 in Sit/7/ Lz/e W//Y/7 Ginger Pot II of 1912, begun in Amsterdam and finished in Paris. And here we come to one of the greatest and most revealing enigmas of twentieth8 century art. It was through Cezanne's example that in the first decade of this century still life became the supreme vehicle for formalistic experiment. In the final analysis Cezanne's still lifes were more directly responsible for helping to shape the Cubist revolution than were his figure pieces or his landscapes. Yet it says something about the nature of abstract art that not one of the great twentieth-century abstractionists moved into non-figuration through still life. Each artist saw his work as being charged with esoteric or hidden meaning; and even the symbolic implications of a large proportion of still lifes executed throughout the ages simply MONDRIAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

8 Cezanne, Still Life with Ginger Jar, oil on canvas, c. 1895.

did not seem to be sufficiently charged with the spiritual and emotive content that could be found in depictions of the human form and of nature and its forces. Although Mondrian was to turn his back so completely on nature, he had matured as a landscape painter; and it was through the obliteration of what had meant most to him visually that he achieved his triumph and his goal. In the early summer of 1911 Mondrian visited Paris for ten days and must have seen Cubist works on display at the Salon des Independants. That autumn, as a committee member, he helped to judge submissions to the first international exhibition of the Moderne Kunstkring (Modern Art Circle, founded in 1910) at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the exhibition included twenty-eight works by Cezanne and examples of the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque, hitherto unknown in Holland. A few months later, Mondrian moved to Paris. He had come to realize that his art must meet the challenge of what was going on there. Basically, Mondrian was not interested in travel, but he always knew instinctively where his art required him to be. Mondrian never became a Cubist. He particularly admired the work of Picasso, but he was never interested in the use of a multiple viewpoint, a method which was central to Picasso's Cubism and which enabled him to render his painted subjects in what might be described as sculptural plenitude. Mondrian may well have read into Cubism a search for formal certainties, whereas in fact Cubism was totally open-ended in its attempt to get to grips with the creation of a revolutionary formal vocabulary by which to render perceived visual reality in a new, completely unnaturalistic manner. The subsequent careers of both its initial creators, Picasso and Braque, demonstrate that this was their prime concern. But Mondrian also saw Cubism in clear-headed fashion, and he recognized that the abandonment of traditional, single-viewpoint perspective destroyed the window through which, for centuries past, Western artists had been looking out upon the external world. Through the Abstract-Real Painter Z he expressed his thoughts thus: 'Cubism understood that perspective representation confuses and weakens the appearance of things .. . Precisely because it sought to represent them as completely as possible Cubism came to represent them in several projections simultaneously.'6 The phrasing is clumsy but the meaning is precise. Mondrian made full use of the grids or scaffoldings of high Analytic Cubism, but put them to new ends, right from the start. He was not concerned with opening his subjects into the space around them and then in exploring the tactility, the palpability of this space; this had been Braque's prime concern, although Picasso also saw the grid as a more flexible way of feeling his way around the contours of things, coaxing more of the image up onto the picture plane. Mondrian wanted, on the contrary, to destroy the distinction between figure and ground, between matter and non-matter. The planes into which he dissolves the image and the space that surrounds it are invariably strictly frontal, and they reaffirm the flatness of the pictorial support. Although these planes hover and hang in front of and behind each other, they do not slide in and out of space as happens in contemporary canvases by Picasso and Braque. Similarly, lights and darks are not angled against each other to produce a sensation of volume and depth; and the blacks of Mondrian's scaffoldings already begin to read as dark elements in their own right. The greatest of Mondrian's Cubist-inspired canvases was undoubtedly Tableau No. 2, Composition No. VII, derived from studies of paired, as opposed to single, trees; and because of this it is instructive to compare this work with the only two2 O

MONDRIAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

is^As^^^J^^r^i^y^L

9 Mondrian, Tableau No. 2, Composition No. VII, oil on canvas, 1913.

r V